Region - Coronavirus scandals and failures
The potential collapse of Brazil’s health systems is a far bigger scandal than anyone jumping in line.
Two weeks ago I wrote about Peru’s vacuna-gate scandal. Some of the details in that piece are now out of date (there were even more kickback/courtesy vaccines than initially disclosed), but the general structure remains correct. There are three things people are angry about: the line jumping, the coverup and the vaccine kickbacks.
Several other scandals have emerged since that newsletter was published. Two other health ministers have resigned. Argentina’s Gines Gonzalez Garcia resigned after a journalist revealed that he was part of a VIP group that was able to obtain early access to vaccines. Ecuador’s Juan Carlos Zevallos resigned after allowing a nursing home where his mother lives and potentially some political allies to jump the line and receive the vaccine. While both countries’ presidents have condemned the line jumping, both face increasing pressure as, similar to Peru, the scandals appear to have uncovered deeper and more systemic corruption within the vaccine distribution instead of one-time “bad apple” events.
Why would any public official be dumb enough to attempt to help their political allies and benefit from these vaccine distribution channels when working on such a high profile issue that everyone is watching? The fact you may have asked that question in your head shows that you don’t think like an entitled public official who is used to getting away with corruption. That these scandals are occurring when it’s obvious to anyone with common sense that the people will get caught points to a much deeper problem with corruption and elite entitlement in the countries where they are occurring.
Also last week, Mexico’s Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell was quite ill with Covid-19 and the government covered up his hospitalization. In Venezuela, there is likely to be a political fight when the Maduro regime tries to move its political base to the front of the line when prioritizing vaccinations.
There will be more scandals to come.
Line jumping is a problem because vaccines are scarce right now. For countries that manage to successfully get their populations vaccinated in the coming year, these scandals may look quaint and unimportant by 2022.
However, leaders that fail to deal with the current or next wave of coronavirus now that vaccines are being distributed may see serious blowback from public opinion. Any covid-related scandals that hit while those public health problems are front and center will be remembered for a long time to come.
I mention this in part because cases, hospitalizations and deaths in Brazil are at their peak levels of this entire crisis. Hospital systems are running out of space in many parts of the country. And President Jair Bolsonaro, as he has for over a year now, is not taking the issue seriously enough.
There was a time last year when Brazil’s coronavirus crisis looked bad but the president’s public opinion numbers improved. There were many factors behind that improvement, but one important aspect were the payments that helped many Brazilians avoid personal economic ruin.
This new round of crisis is different than last year, not just because case numbers are even higher than before, but because the payments to the poor have been cut, the budget has little space for more stimulus, the currency has dropped and food/fuel inflation is hitting consumers hard.
Latin America is in a race against time in terms of getting the most vulnerable populations vaccinated before the next wave hits. There is a lot about the Brazilian variant of Covid-19 of which public health experts are uncertain. What we do know is that Manaus had its highest death rates in January and February 2021 in spite of the surge in cases that it experienced last year.
Individual cases of line jumping and other covid-related scandals do not directly matter to the overall response by governments. But they may be a symptom of ineffective responses and populations will definitely blame those scandals for future surges in Covid deaths in any country in which they occur.
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